Improving Science Education: Training Teachers to Effectively Utilize Network Resources in the Classroom

Project Director: Gregory D. Bothun, Assoc. Prof., Physics Department, University of Oregon

Stephen Fickas: Assoc. Prof., Computer and Info. Science, University of Oregon

Joanne Hugi: Director, Computing Services, University of Oregon

David Meyer: Senior Network Engineer, University of Oregon

Leslie Conery: Staff Development Specialist, Springfield Public Schools, Springfield OR

There has been a national call for improvement in teacher productivity as well as student mastery of subjects. This is especially critical in the area of science education. We therefore wish to establish an electronic network of resources that allow the student to duplicate the steps that a professional scientist makes in drawing inferences from real data. This would naturally draw students into the discovery aspects of science. Teacher training in the use of these electronically available databases is of paramount importance if this project is to succeed. Ultimately, we plan to make network laboratory experiments using remotely controlled scientific instruments (such as a telescope or a laser) possible. Such a mechanism directly delivers University resources into the K12 classroom in a very dynamic way that will allow for student participation and interaction with the experiment.

Within local school districts there is growing recognition of the potential classroom use of network resources to augment and supplement extant curricula. In February 1994, representatives from many school Districts attended a demonstration, held at the University of Oregon, on how the Internet can be used to form an electronic partnership between the University and local school districts for the purposes of developing more sophisticated and up to date core course curriculum, with a particular emphasis on science education. While all the representatives were clearly enthusiastic about this partnership, it was clear that teacher training is an essential component to towards realizing efficient classroom implementation of various network resources. Electronic resource materials are available now and with appropriate training the District teachers can in fact make the electronic classroom a dynamic supplement to existing core course curricula for their students. Funding of this grant will make possible teacher stipends for release time to acquire the skills necessary to use the available electronic materials and the acquisition of appropriate workstation hardware at training sites to deliver an effective training curriculum.

This proposal intends to target the Springfield School District central training facility as well as a similar facility in the Albany school district. These districts have been chosen solely on the basis that USWest has agreed to fund a trial project that will connect these districts directly to the University at T1 (1.5 megabits per second) speeds. This bandwidth is sufficient to rapidly deliver both text and graphically based information directly to the classroom, in real time. An investment was made this year by Springfield in the Walterville Elementary school as a model technology school. The school has acquired a Sun server as well as a multi-media lab to explore the uses of technology in the elementary setting. Walterville is located 15 miles outside of Springfield and the community it serves is comprised of many displaced-timber-worker families. The children attending Walterville seldom have access to technology other than that provided by the school. These children are miles from the nearest library, museums, and other educational opportunities. This proposal to train teachers and in turn make technology available to a rural community opens tremendous opportunities for the students and their families. The delivery of these electronic materials from the University of Oregon will permit student participation and interaction and remove the geographic barriers. Without the funding made possible by this grant, the numbers of teachers able to participate in training will be limited. Further the training equipment on-hand is not current technology and will hamper full exploration of the electronic resources available and limit the vision of what the electronic classroom can be.

Teachers experiencing professional growth while collaborating with University researchers is a powerful model. In all disciplines, schools strive to bring students closer to experiencing the excitement, hard work, and satisfaction of real world contributions. Springfield Public Schools has neither the fiscal or human resources to pursue a project of this magnitude without external assistance. This school system, based in a timber dependent community, is suffering severe budget cuts due to a state-wide property tax limitation. Class sizes have increased while classroom support has been severely reduced. However, the enthusiastic desire for an opportunity to participate in this project goes beyond material benefits. As the lines between levels and avenues of education begin to blur, teachers need the opportunity to interact with professionals in the disciplines about which they teach. The chance for teachers to collaborate with scientists, to teach students using real data from current research projects, and to bring the excitement of the profession into the classroom, is the direction in which we need to move. Current trends in education include authentic assessment, collaborative learning, life long learning skills, and problem solving. Allowing students the opportunity to interact and study with their teachers and professional scientists using global access to real world data will help these goals to be acheived.

If information technology is to enhance educational quality and productivity, the design of technological solutions to educational problems must take into account the human dimensions of teaching and learning. The focal point for success, however, remains with the teacher, not the delivery mechanism or the technology. Hence, teachers need to be exposed to what is available and how best to use the technology. The University of Oregon in combination with local school districts in Springfield and Albany therefore seeks support to engage in an active educational outreach program with primary emphasis on teacher training and support.

High Bandwidth electronic networks offer the possibility of forming learning communities of educators who can share and develop courseware. The process can be highly interactive and feedback from the students can be integrated into improving the content. Most importantly, this network facilitates educational outreach activities between Higher Education and Secondary School systems. Physical distance is no longer an obstacle in having University level resources and personnel delivered to the local K-12 classrooms. However, none of this potential electronic partnership between Higher Ed and the Secondary Schools, as well as the development of a more dynamic curriculum, will ever occur unless teachers understand the technology and are enthusiastic about its implementation. We expect to make multimedia source material available in the areas of Astronomy and Environmental Sciences, to train the teachers on how to access that material and then to personalize their curriculum around that material. We will develop and test applications that promote learning and support student-teacher and teacher-teacher interactions in primary and secondary education.

The principle objective of our project is to train teachers in the use of the Internet as an effective two-way educational tool which will allow joint curriculum development, exchange of multi-media based information and frequent communication between K-12 teachers and university faculty and/or research personnel. Recent advances in information exchange using the Internet now make it possible to deliver full multi-media presentations to non-local classrooms. The primary delivery tool is a Public Domain software product called Mosaic. Mosaic works on the principle of hypertext for easy navigation. Text, images, animation and sound can all be delivered to the remote desk top. Mosaic clients are linked together through the World Wide Web (developed at the CERN High Energy Facility in Geneva) so that anyone in the world with an Internet connection can access any material that is made available. For the past 2 months, the project directory (PD) has been developing a wide range of educational materials in Mosaic format. Most of these are related to astronomy and environmental science. This effort can be reviewed by setting your Uniform Resource Locator (URL) in Mosaic to

  • to use this Pilot project as a vehicle to introduce, train and educate local area K-12 science teachers about the resources of the Internet and how an interactive curriculum can be built around those resources

  • to develop a set of questions for the students that require searching the Internet for the material which is most relevant to the question. My local Web server (e.g. bovine.uoregon.edu ) can easily be configured to point at these other resources to guide the students in their quest for source material.

  • to develop and offer a fully integrated set of educational resources in the area of environmental science. Currently one can get up to date information on the distribution of ocean temperature, the size of the ozone hole, the latest earthquakes, severe weather, etc over the Internet. More and more remote sensing material is being made available and NASA's project EARTH will almost certainly make heavy use of the Internet as the delivery vehicle of the information to the public. Teachers need to understand how to rapidly find this material and access it in a way that is conducive for learning activities.

    The most effective way for the University of Oregon to engage in educational outreach programs to local schools that are connected to the Internet is via the development of a set of distance learning activities that will foster a learning community of educations that feedback to one another through the network. The tools are now available to provide this service over the Internet. The development of a team designed electronically based curriculum for access by students at any level through Internet and LaneNET (our county network that connects all the schools) has a number of positive attributes:

    Finally, the successful implementation of this project will usher in a new era of cooperation between Universities and Secondary Schools with the sole goal of providing teachers more resources to work with and hence to develop a more concentrated (and modern) curriculum. The positive benefits of this implementation include the following:

    The means (Internet connectivity) and the delivery tools (Mosaic) now exist and are in place. The benefits to be gained by proper teacher training and professional development in the use of existing networks and network resources are immense. Classroom walls and rural isolation become non-issues. Teams of students, from different schools, can explore central issues, can communicate with themselves and can feed back to a variety of experts on the subject. This is a true learning community that involves people with many different backgrounds and many different levels of expertise in the subject. We can rapidly move beyond a single textbook or a single teacher being the source of information to a vast array of ON line information that is detailed, current and accurate. The teachers need to appreciate the potential offered by these materials, to not feel threatened by this new technology and to learn to effectively harvest materials appropriate for the age level and classes they are teaching.

    In sum, moving towards an electronic classroom with full accessibility to worldwide information systems should be part of our general plan towards educating students to become responsible members of the global community. While one can quarrel over pedagogical aspects of how to best implement this, clearly the first step towards implementation is reasonable access to the information which is stored in a manner to allow teachers and students to effectively access it. Since the expertise for maintaining and distributing the computer based information and for developing curriculum based on actual University lecture material, resides at the University, then this proposed pilot program is a concrete step toward fully realizing an important goal -- making the University of Oregon a local resource for all educators and students in the State of Oregon. The first step in realizing this goal is to educate, excite and train teachers about this new resource.

    Major Activities to be Accomplished:

    Our plan of operation is the following:

    1. To train 20--30 K-12 science teachers into how to effectively use the Internet to seek out resources that can supplement there course material.

    2. To train teachers in the efficient use of Internet communication tools (USENET news, or the more sophisticated public whiteboard session offered under Collage) to promote cross-talk, shared resources, and joint curriculum development.

    3. To train teachers in the smooth operation and understanding of the use of X-terminals, or X-windows emulation on PC's and Macs as a means of gaining full functionality Internet access.

    4. To train teachers on how to design and implement their own electronic courseware through the Mosaic interface. This involves little more than using a word processor to generate a files on some computing platform. The actual process of turning that file into a Mosaic document will initially be done by designated personnel at the University of Oregon. Eventually, since we are designing this project to be self-sustaining, the teachers themselves will be able to accomplish this task in a transparent fashion.

    5. To target the areas of astronomy and Environmental Sciences for teachers to center an updated curriculum around. Teams of teachers will be exposed to the available resources and then assigned to develop courseware around them. All ideas will be shared and commented on by the group until a practical curriculum has evolved.

    The major activities that will be carried out under this program in the 12 month Budgetary Period are the following:

    Both the Springfield and Albany Districts can provide an evaluation specialist as a support person to help evaluate the project. The principle means of evaluation will be concerned with changes in teacher attitude and behavior. This will be assessed as follows:

  • Change in teacher attitude as measured using questionnaires (easier to quantify) or interviews before the first inservice and at the end of the project.

  • Logging the number of on-line interactions between each teacher and 1) colleagues, 2) experts

  • Logging of the kinds of e-mail questions asked by students. This will be done anonymously.

    In terms of dissemination, we expect the participant teachers to engage in a a conference presentation at the Northwest Conference for Computers in Education (Bellevue WA, March 1995). The presentation would be using the Internet and our server to mimic what is being conducted in the classroom. More details from the project can also be put on some of the education list servers like EdNet and KidsNet.